Network usage, network technologies, and the number of broadband applications involving networks have been growing at an explosive rate in recent years. The use of such applications as multimedia and teleconferencing involving networks is similarly expanding. Multimedia and teleconferencing applications typically include the transfer of a large bandwidth of video, audio, and perhaps other data types between the source of the transmission and a transceiver located at each one of the end users. Video transfer, audio transfer, and possibly other types of data transfer over networks involve the use of considerable bandwidth. One challenge for network designers and service providers is thus providing sufficient high bandwidth to its end user transceivers for high-bandwidth applications. Another challenge is to maximize the utilization of the bandwidth of existing network infrastructures by maximizing the efficiency of protocols that transfer data between locations.
The Internet has become the medium for the distribution for a variety of multimedia and teleconferencing communications. The Internet has enabled the emergence of such communications and information technology devices as personal computers, laptop computers, Internet phones, and handheld computer devices. These communication and information technology devices have been utilized for the distribution of data among users in either a local area network environment or a wide area network environment. The demands resulting from the convergence of telecommunications, computing, and video distribution technologies also drive technology development.
Transceivers, in addition to its other tasks, append packet header information using a computer processor to packets to be transmitted over the network. The processing time required for the computer processor to route the packet is included in the time required by the transceiver to transmit the data. Therefore, the processing time of the computer processor associated with the end user transceivers contributes to the latency of the transceivers of the network system in transferring data. This increased transceiver latency reduces the data transfer rate between the end user transceivers. Additionally, irregular packet transmission through the computer processor may result in jitter at other end users.
Data distribution centers control and monitor the transmission of such data as audio and video to (or between) end user transceivers. Data distribution centers allot a fixed bandwidth for service, regardless of the application. Even if the application is, for example, a high bandwidth teleconferencing application that requires considerable bandwidth, then the bandwidth allotted to the application is similar to a lower bandwidth application.
Both connection-oriented and connectionless-oriented protocols transfer data (e.g., packets) in different embodiments of communication systems. The user datagram protocol (UDP), for example, is a connectionless transport layer protocol commonly used to transmit packetized data over the Internet. UDP is considered a connectionless protocol since no connection is established between the data source and the end user transceivers; as such packets transmitted between the same data source and the same end users for the same call may follow different paths. Additionally, UDP may provide the packets to the receiver in a different order from which the packets were transmitted. UDP is considered a relatively light protocol since little header information (data) is appended to the packet. Using such a connectionless, best-effort protocol as UDP to transfer data such as audio or video on a broadcast network is somewhat unreliable since an end user transmitter cannot guarantee that an end user receiver will receive the packets. UDP is thus a best-effort protocol that does not guarantee packet transmission or a quality of service (QOS) to its end user transceivers. UDP does not require the use of a time-stamp.
However, providing a more reliable connection-oriented protocol (e.g., one that indicates at the transmitting transceiver that the receiving transceiver received a certain packet) is not effective for retransmitting video or audio applications since the replacement packet would be stale as a result of the round-trip latency necessary to request, and provide, the replacement packet. A stale packet cannot be integrated in an ongoing audio/video program because the stale packet does not accurately reflect the current digital state.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a broadband network system for transferring video/audio data in which the data provided by an end user transmitting transceiver is transmitted directly to the network node (and then to the end user receiving transceiver) without the packet being processed by a computer processor. Passing data through the computer processor associated with the transmitting transceiver necessitates additional processing and header information-appending time. In one aspect, it would be desired to provide a connection-oriented communications protocol that provides a bandwidth selected for any application that guarantees to an end user transmitter a session having a prescribed QOS. The QOS would ensure that the end user receiving transceiver has received and continues to receive transmitted packets. In another aspect, it would be desired to provide security between the transceiver and the data distribution center to ensure that a person communicating from any transmitting transceiver or any receiving transceiver is actually the intended party.